Author: Grayson McKinney

We are two 4th grade teachers in Michigan who believe in Innovation for Education! We are passionate about being innovative in our practice and pushing the need for innovation in education. Our goal in creating this blog is to show you how we have come to leverage technology in our classroom to cultivate critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and creativity – skills that empower our students to find their voice and make their thinking visible – while preparing them for the jobs of the future.

Mystery Skype is a global guessing game where 2 classes from anywhere in the world Skype each other, taking it, in turn, to ask yes/no questions to determine where the other school is located and what its name is. The first class to find out wins! It’s like playing 20 questions… on a global scale! Continue reading “Mystery Skype in a Nutshell…”→

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Why Reinventing the Wheel is a Good Thing

One thing that I’ve come to learn about myself is that I can’t stand to do things I’ve already done. I live for novelty… and this goes for almost every aspect of my life. I used to be a huge collector of DVDs. At one point, I had around 300 in the collection. But thousands of dollars too late, I realized that once I owned it, I never watched it again. Continue reading “Never Settle for “Good Enough””→

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Do you feel… Do you feel like we do?

-Peter Frampton

I recently read a blog post directed towards administrators of schools and other people in charge of hiring new employees. There, it was claimed that it’s too often the case that we hire applicants based on the right answers rather than truly finding the right people. When hiring a single teacher can really be a 3 million dollar decision over the course of a 30 year career, it’s clear that we should be taking due diligence in hiring the right people. One of the most important qualities that leads to being a “right people” person, in my humble opinion, is emotional intelligence. A person’s EQ, in many aspects, is more important than an IQ. Additionally, emotional intelligence is far more malleable and able to be influenced by “nurture” versus “nature”. And so, as we search for one last gift to give our students, the gift of understanding feelings seems like a necessary choice.

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Gift #5 – Happiness is Helping Others

My first principal, Mrs. Linda Kehm, of Lakeside Elementary School, was best known to the her elementary students as having coined the phrase, “Kindness Counts”. My younger brother even won an award for his public displays of kindness after I had moved on to the middle school. While I was never bestowed with this prestigious honor, the importance of kindness stuck with me, permanently ingrained, and as a teacher I realize how important it is to emphasize its power to students as early and often as you can.

If you’ve been following along with our recent series, The Seven Greatest Gifts You Can Give Your Students, you might be wondering where to begin, or how to fit it all in to our already over-crowded plates. For us, the inspiration and messaging of our classroom culture of kindness all started with one video. That video was the seed that we planted in the beginning and watched grow all year. Check it out! Watch as the camera tracks a single act of kindness as it’s passed from one individual to the next and (spoiler alert) manages to “boomerang” back to the person who set it into motion. Continue reading “Kindness Keeps the World Afloat”→

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The Seven Greatest Gifts We Can Give Our Students – Gift #3

We’ve blogged before about the importance of living mindfully, for teachers and students alike. Mindfulness in itself is a gift that we must strive to give to our students. We have to let them know that there’s a fulfilling way to live their lives that leads to contentment. Bringing a sense of peace, calm, and serenity to the classroom can pave the way for a culture of safety, curiosity, and deep learning. In this post, we’ll remind you of all the reasons you want to teach your students to be present in the moment, but we’ll also add another important dimension to this philosophy: cultivating the attitude of gratitude in your students and yourself.

Previously, Zach wrote about one simple word that can change one’s life: YET. There’s another magical word that our classroom reveres… and it isn’t “please” or “thank you”. The word that we put up on a pedestal (right next to yet) is: GET. Yes, the title of this blog post is an in-line rhyme. And yes, YET rhymes with GET… but the way in which this word can change the culture of your classroom is very different and equally powerful. Whereas YET can turn a fixed mindset into a growth mindset, GET plants the seeds of gratitude in the hearts and minds of our kids.